Tag Archives: wood

Taiwanese artist Hsu Tung Han recently unveiled his latest sculptural work, a 5-foot snorkeler that appears partially pixelated. Han often incorporates digital glitches into has carved figurative works, a few of which we shared earlier this year. You can see more views of this piece and other recent works on Flickr.

Lebanese-Brazilian artist Camille Kachani creates humorous wooden sculptures that directly reference their origin, weaving root systems into household objects like chairs and shelves, while sprouting leafy plants from the handles of hammers and hedge clippers. Due to their overgrown state, the sculptures he builds are rendered unusable, almost as if their original material is attempting to reclaim the carved form. Garden tools like a shovel and a hoe appear to come alive, fake leaves covering the branches that have forked from their wooden base.

You can see more of Kachani’s works through Sao Paulo’s Zipper Galeria where he is currently represented.

If you had to summarize an all-encompassing theme to describe Maskull Lasserre’s artistic practice, the word would probably be tension. From the balance of life and death to the opposing forces of war and peace, the Candian artist explores tension not only metaphorically but physically as well. Case in point, his latest piece titled Schrodinger’s Wood carved from the trunk of an Ash tree that relies on the tree’s inner core to serve as a tangled mass of rope in the process of fraying from the weight of itself. The work appears to share a kindred spirit to his sliced piano artwork, Improbable Worlds. You can see more views on his website.

WoodSwimmer is a new short film by engineer and stop-motion animator Brett Foxwell, who has built armatures for films such as Boxtrolls and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Created in collaboration with musician and animator bedtimes, the work follows a piece of raw wood through a milling machine, capturing its unique growth rings, knots, and weathered spots through a series of cross-sectional photographic scans. Due the speed at which the images are animated, the log’s grains begin to flow like granules of sand—shifting, mixing, and flowing in a vibrant dance that seems completely removed from its rigid material.

“Fascinated with the shapes and textures found in both newly-cut and long-dead pieces of wood, I envisioned a world composed entirely of these forms,” Foxwell told Colossal. “As I began to engage with the material, I conceived a method using a milling machine and an animation camera setup to scan through a wood sample photographically and capture its entire structure. Although a difficult and tedious technique to refine, it yielded gorgeous imagery at once abstract and very real. Between the twisting growth rings, swirling rays, knot holes, termites and rot, I found there is a lot going on inside of wood.”

Heads up: watching this full-screen in HD with sound makes all the difference. You can see more of Foxwell’s works, like his 19-minute film Fabricated, on his Vimeo.

Heads facing downward, eyes closed, the figures inhabiting the world of painter and sculptor Jaime Molina (previously) seem to be in a state of deep contemplation or sorrow. Or maybe they’re just hungover and taking a nap. The mystery is part of Molina’s intention as he assembles these strange characters from found wood to inhabit his fictional world called “Cutty Town” — he refers to the objects themselves as “Cuttys”. At once strangely familiar and approachable, the pieces sprout hairdos of bent nails, cacti, and leaves that add more questions left only to the viewer to answer.

Industrial design studio BKID conceived of this lovely wooden bird pencil holder called Tropical Bird. The object won a 2013 Red Dot Design award and you can see a view more photos over on Behance. If you liked this, also check out Moisés Hernández’s watercolor bird project.